Young Bradman

87 Australia and Bradman Australia has seen in partnership two of the finest young batsmen who have ever appeared in Test cricket.’ Jack Ryder, having lost his fourth Test as captain, naturally dwelt on those ‘two New South Wales colts’: ‘… two wonderful boys who will be a great asset to us.’ Why did men usually put Jackson’s name ahead of Bradman’s - which implied, as with Lennon and McCartney, that the first name was more important than the other – when Bradman was older, and by the end of the 1928/29 series had scored two Test centuries to Jackson’s one? And why keep calling them boys, when they were not? The older and retired players may have been implying that the pair were still only ‘promising’; they would do even better. Yet how much better than 452 could anyone do?! In his 1921 novel That Test Match , the tale of Paul Rignold – match-winner for Eton, war hero, all-rounder for Middlesex - Sir Home Gordon had Rignold read, before the Australian tour of 1921, of himself described as ‘promising’. His wife Vanda asked: ‘When does a cricketer get past the promising stage, Paul?’ ‘When he reaches the disappointing one,’ he replied. The work of fiction was truer than many books of facts. A sportsman did not control his reputation off the field; others would decide when he stopped being ‘promising’, and what he became instead. Bradman’s only control, the only undeniable facts, came with number of runs. On a fine winter’s day in August 1998, I took an old map and set off on my friend’s bicycle, from the house that my friend rented on a ridge above Bowral. I was heading for the deserted village of Joadja, a dozen miles away. I followed the map and crossed the old main highway. The road became rougher and rougher, until so many fallen tree branches covered it that I had to carry the cycle. It made no sense. Then a fence blocked the road altogether. I looked over it and understood. The new main road from Sydney to Melbourne, newer than my map, was in my way, in a cutting. I lifted the bicycle over the fence, waited for a gap in the traffic, pushed it across, and on the other side found my road again. Bradman’s tour of England in 1930 was like that road that sliced across mine. It was something different, and exciting; and dangerous, if you were careless.